Review and testing of ASUS ROG Strix B650-A Gaming WiFi motherboard

In our review, we present to you the ASUS ROG Strix B650-A Gaming WiFi motherboard, kindly provided to us by ASUS.

This subsection of our review highlights the main aspects of the ASUS ROG Strix B650-A Gaming WiFi, such as appearance and hardware configuration.

The motherboard comes in a fairly beautiful and compact package, nothing that we think is superfluous:

The motherboard kit is quite standard as for all motherboards:

To ensure optimal temperature conditions and maximum performance of Ryzen processors and system components, the motherboard ROG Strix B650-A Gaming WiFi is equipped with massive heatsinks for VRM, chipset and M.2 modules. 

ROG Strix B650-A Gaming WiFi includes 4 DDR5 DIMM modules with a maximum capacity of up to 64 gigabytes and a frequency of up to 6400 MHz. For the file subsystem, the motherboard supports 3 M.2 PCIe 5.0/4.0 x4 slots and 4 SATA 6 Gb/s ports.

We can only install one video card here, since we only have one full-fledged PCI-E:

ROG Strix B650-A Gaming WiFi features the newfangled AMD Socket AM5 for AMD Ryzen 7000 series processors:

ROG Strix B650-A Gaming WiFi is equipped with a highly reliable power supply system, with 12 power modules designed to work with powerful multi-threaded AMD Ryzen 7000 series processors.

ROG Strix B650-A Gaming WiFi offers a large number of USB ports on the rear panel, including HDMI, Display Port and USB4 Type-C with 40 Gbps bandwidth and support for 8K display output. Wi-Fi 6E and 2.5G Ethernet interfaces are responsible for high data transfer speeds on the network.

4 SATA 6 Gb/s ports are located along the end board very compactly:

The sound is provided by the built-in SupremeFX audio chip, which has very good acoustic capabilities:

If desired, we can freely switch to the Advanced mode where we will carry out all the manipulations:

We have an incredible amount of settings to control absolutely all aspects of the motherboard: 

Additional utilities included in UEFI will allow us to easily save user profiles, update a new firmware version, and also find out information about system components:

We’ll talk about overclocking a little further.

But you’re unlikely to see the maximum temperature until you start a workload that uses all CPU cores. During all day work, light loads, and most games, the processor temperature is usually significantly lower.

To give users control, ASUS has released a BIOS update for the X670 and B650 motherboards with new PBO enhancements that can easily balance temperature and performance. PBO Enhancement BIOS makes it easy to limit temperatures for multi-threaded workloads.

To access this option in the UEFI BIOS, you need to activate advanced mode. Let’s go to the tab Extreme Tweaker and select Precision Boost Overdrive. UEFI BIOS settings to improve PBO by displaying a drop-down menu where users can select their preferred temperature level.

In the menu that opens, select “Improvement” from the Precision Boost Overdrive drop-down list. You can then choose from three preset temperature limits. Level 1 will set the maximum target temperature to 90° Celsius, which is a slight step down from the default of 95° Celsius. Levels 2 and 3 reduce the maximum processor temperature more aggressively, to 80° and 70° Celsius, respectively. It was tested in more detail in our previous review

As an example, let’s take only the activation of PBO Enhancement Level 1, which reduced the temperature by 5 °C, maximizing system performance and reducing the processor heating temperature limit to 90 degrees. Enhancement Level 2/3 lead to an even greater decrease in temperature, but performance also decreases relative to even the default 95 °C…

As for overclocking the latest generations of processors, this is already a rather delicate science, because lately processors have been sold at maximum overclocked frequencies. The AMD Ryzen 7000 series processors were also no exception, so by chasing an increase in processor frequency, the average person can even do the opposite – do harm by significantly increasing its heating and thereby reducing performance.

 To obtain maximum system performance, we used memory 32 GB DDR5 6000 Kingston FURY Renegade, having received a maximum bus of 3000 MHz and reduced the timings to CL 30.

Now we will show you how gaming performance changes at 5200 CL 40, 5600 CL 40 (32 GB DDR5 5600 Kingston FURY Beast ) and 6000 CL40, 6000 CL30 (32 GB DDR5 6000 Kingston FURY Renegade) using the example of the AIDA64 cache and memory test:

Well, as we can see, the best result was achieved with a memory frequency of 6000 and manually setting the CL30 timings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Testing took place at maximum quality settings with 1000 units

In Mount & Blade II Bannerlord we see that with 3000 bus and 6000 memory cl30 the motherboard has the best performance.

Testing took place at maximum quality settings and with ray tracing.

Here we see the situation described above – 6000/3000 is more preferable.

Testing took place at maximum quality settings and with ray tracing.

But here from overclocking we have a profit in the range of up to 10% of the nominal value.

Testing took place at maximum quality settings.

In Knights of Gotham we also have a profit from overclocking, the average FPS is quite significant.

Testing took place at maximum quality settings and with ray tracing.

В The Callisto Protocol The 7950X doesn’t perform very well, but overclocking the memory and bus significantly improves its results.

Testing took place at maximum quality settings with RT without frame generation.

In The Witcher, there is practically no profit from overclocking.

Testing took place at maximum quality settings with RT.

Well, in Marvel’s Midnight Suns we also have a significant increase in performance, by the way, you will see a review of this game tomorrow!

Well, after testing the ROG Strix B650-A Gaming WiFi I left a pleasant impression. It is attractive in appearance and has good equipment. Much attention is paid to the power of the power subsystem and cooling, which allows you to use the most powerful processors of the AMD Ryzen 7000 series without any problems and, within certain limits, experiment with overclocking.

In general, in terms of the level of bells and whistles, this model can easily be compared with many motherboards on the more powerful X670 chipset (X670E), but the B650 chipset used here made the cost more attractive.

Essentially, the B650 is the same X670, with all the bells and whistles, but reduced in the number of PCI-E lanes for video cards – we can only put one video card here, although this is not a minus, since SLI and CF are long dead.

Advantages

– excellent performance

– good overclocking potential

– more attractive price compared to solutions based on X670

Disadvantages

– one full-size PCI-E slot (personally for us)